This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
FAIR HAVEN — When Hope Turi moved her family into a manufactured home at the Green Mountain Mobile Manor one year ago, it felt like everything clicked right into place.
Turi’s family of seven had been living in northern Maine. Following an emergency birth for her youngest kids, a set of twin boys, Turi wanted to move closer to medical specialists — and to her parents, who live across the border in New York, she said. After a stint bunking with relatives, the family found their own home at the Fair Haven park. It was a short drive from the Vermont State University campus in Castleton where Turi began pursuing a social work degree. Her older children settled right into their new elementary school.
She also couldn’t beat the price: The home cost her family $15,000, Turi said, which they could manage on her part-time salary as a substitute teacher and her husband’s work as a property maintenance contractor.
“It was a perfect opportunity for us,” she said. “Just until I got through school, we could actually buy a nice house.”
What Turi didn’t know was that the administrator of the estate that owns the Rutland County park had been in discussions with state officials about closing it down. Stuck in probate court for over a decade, the estate was out of money and owed the town of Fair Haven tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid property taxes and water bills. Water system leaks were a common occurrence, according to local officials. About half of the lots in the 20-unit park were abandoned.
Soon after moving in, Turi began hearing that the park might sell or shutter. Official word came in March. The state had approved the park’s expedited closure, citing health and safety concerns. Instead of closing down in 18 months — the time allotted in state law — the park could shut its doors Sept. 1.
Now, Turi and her neighbors are staring down an eviction. Many manufactured homes are hardly “mobile,” and even if they could technically be hauled off on a truck, a tight underpass between the park and the main road to town is a pinch point. Any resident able to get their house out would still need to find a new piece of land to place it. While residents have been directed to resources to buy or rent new homes, neither the estate nor the state are required to compensate Turi and her neighbors for their existing houses — for many, their most valuable asset.
Turi has tried and so far failed to find an affordable apartment to relocate her family before the new school year begins. In a recent wave of desperation, she sent a letter to lawmakers and reporters pleading for some kind of recourse.
“The closure of Green Mountain Mobile Manor cannot end with families being told to abandon their homes and simply figure it out on their own,” Turi wrote.
Deferred maintenance
Manufactured home park closures are fairly rare in Vermont. But the pressures leading to this one are not uncommon.
The bulk of the state’s 238 parks were established in the 1960s and ’70s, according to a registry maintained by state officials. As park owners die, their families aren’t always eager to take over, said Housing Commissioner Alex Farrell. Deferred maintenance often piles up. In smaller parks like the Green Mountain Mobile Manor, keeping up with costly repairs to roads, water lines and sewer infrastructure is only harder.
“Those things age, and when it comes time for a major upgrade, that’s a huge hit for, say, just 10 households,” Farrell said.
Even as the state has directed public money toward infrastructure upgrades in manufactured home parks in recent years, maintenance costs have contributed to a recent uptick in park sales, officials say.
In 2025, the owners of 17 parks told the state they planned to sell their properties, the most since the state began keeping digital records in 2008. The uptick has continued in the first half of 2026, according to Scott Sharland, housing program coordinator for the Department of Housing and Community Development. He has heard from two additional park owners in recent weeks who are considering closing their parks, he said.
The owners of manufactured homes in parks are particularly vulnerable. They own their houses — some of the most affordable housing in the state — but not the land underneath them. That raises the stakes when parks change hands or shut down.
Over the years, the state has tried to protect these homeowners by giving them unique privileges, like the right of first refusal to tap a nonprofit buyer when parks go up for sale – or cooperatively purchase parks themselves.
Yet that option only works in larger parks, when there are enough residents to spread the load of both maintenance costs and volunteer operations tasks, said Julia Curry, a co-director at Cooperative Development Institute, an organization that supports manufactured home co-ops in New England.
The Green Mountain Mobile Manor residents briefly tried to make a collective purchase, according to Turi and documents obtained by Vermont Public/VTDigger. The plan didn’t pan out before the estate was legally allowed to move forward with the closure, though Turi said residents are still trying to pull together a plan.
CDI didn’t consider assisting the park, Curry said. Not only was the park too small, but the deteriorating infrastructure and high vacancies would be too much to address.
“I’ve never seen such a long list of challenges,” Curry said.
Nowhere to go
The owner of Green Mountain Mobile Manor, Rodney White, died in 2015. His estate has been tied up in probate court since, and its primary asset is the Fair Haven park, which is insolvent.
That’s according to a February 2026 letter written by Kevin Kite, a Middlebury attorney who serves as the current administrator of the estate, urging state officials to approve the park’s swift closure. Kite declined to be interviewed for this story.
In the letter, obtained by Vermont Public/VTDigger, Kite wrote that only three households reliably pay the rent for their lots and that just nine of the 20 lots are occupied at all. The IRS holds a lien on the property over $125,000. The park’s water and septic systems have been prone to failures and have been addressed with only patchwork fixes, he wrote.
“To date, we have managed to avert catastrophe, but continued operation poses a substantial risk that a major failure will place residents at immediate and prolonged risk to their health and safety,” Kite wrote.
The estate owes the town of Fair Haven over $56,700 in water bills and $83,500 in property taxes, according to Town Manager Joseph Gunter. The town has intervened to help repair the park’s infrastructure, Gunter said. It has also shut off water to the park in the past because of unpaid bills, prompting residents to sue the town in 2022.
Farrell, the housing commissioner, signed off on Kite’s closure request this spring. Because of the “general difficulty of finding housing throughout Vermont,” Farrell wrote in March, officials “must weigh the competing interests of protecting the health and safety of the residents from the failing infrastructure of the park, versus the potential of forcing the residents into homelessness or another dire housing condition during the winter months.”
Yet residents dispute the immediacy of the infrastructure problems at the park and argue that they need more time to sort out their relocation plans. In early 2025, during a previous attempt to close the park, advocates at the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity surveyed residents and ultimately recommended that state officials give them the full 18-month notice period.
“The GMMM community’s challenges could be better addressed through improved management and proper resident protection and support rather than an expedited closure,” a staffer in CVOEO’s mobile home program wrote in a report obtained by Vermont Public/VTDigger. When the closure question came up again this year, the state went forward with the expedited closure anyway.
On a recent Wednesday afternoon, Hope Turi’s kids hopped off the school bus at the park’s edge and ran over to Diane Ferguson, a longtime resident of the park who they call “Grandma D.” The families regularly share campfires and s’mores together. Ferguson, a cook at a senior care center in Poultney, said she is recovering from lung surgery and already struggling to keep up with her bills at the home she shares with a friend. She doesn’t know what she’ll do when the park closes.
“We don’t have nowhere to go, no money,” Ferguson said. She’s worried she’ll end up living out of a motel room.
